Programming a Personal Computer

Per Brinch Hansen develops a programming system for a PC from the ground up, by designing a simplified dialect of Pascal (Edison) and implementing it portably. All the source code is published and, in this reviewer's opinion and experience, is free of error. If thst is not enough to attract a serious programmer, Brinch Hansen's implementation of concurrent processing in Edison (which also appears in his later work) and his construction of an operating system without the use of pointers commends it. The fact that the original system was DEC LSI-11 is not so important because the Edison machine has been ported to IBM PCs and most of the work remains relevant.